Www-users.cs.umn.edu/~carlis/spiral.pdf. Force-Directed Graph with Mouseover. D3 Without SVG - Jim Vallandingham. Typically, when creating interactive visualizations with d3.js, you are building your graphics up in SVG.
While much of the D3 library is platform-independent, and there is even a small example using just html in the D3 tutorials, SVG is the typically used for all but the simplest D3 experiments. Recently, the New York Times published an interactive visualization on the electorial map for the up-coming American presidential election. It features a bubble chart inspired interactive ‘game’ in which users can make their own predictions about which way undecided states will swing to see how the election might turn out. I think its a great piece. Drawing Graphs with D3JS Part 1 » tl;dr. The purpose of this series will be to illustrate the ways in which the javascript visualization library, d3js, is used to create force-directed graphs.
Several of the methods used in this series have been illustrated in their examples, but I hope this will unify several of their concepts into a single series. This post will introduce the basics. The second post will describe consuming gephx datafiles. The third post will describe how to draw various elements typically found in a graph. Graph layout d3js.